NEW YORK -- It may be drawn from a deep feeling of responsibility or a perverse sense of guilt, but when architect Shigeru Ban sees the suffering earthquakes bring, he feels compelled to act.
"Earthquakes don't kill people," he said in serious, hushed tones. "Buildings do. If we built them better, people would not die."
It's a typically enigmatic response from an enigmatic architect. Ban's paper-tube houses and buildings have won him applause worldwide, not only for their visionary design but also for their application to humanitarian causes; they were used to house displaced victims of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake and more recently in Turkey.